Close only counts in horseshoes and hand grenades. I'm impressed that it's real time. I'm impressed with the quality of the skin shading and lighting but there is no "almost" when it comes to crossing the valley. You're either in it, or you're not and this most definitely is in it.

As to what this is, danylyon, from what I understood its cached data for the mesh animation extrapolated from spherical video sampling of a real face. Then it's shaded, lit and played back in real time. I didn't get the impression that they were doing any sort of facial re-targeting. I believe they used a similar technique for performance capture in LA Noire, another valley dweller.

Every time I see one of these, I cringe a little. Maybe I'm a Luddite, but I just think this quest for the holy grail of CG is some how wrong headed. It doesn't serve story and is often a distraction visually. Movies like Polar Express and Beowulf point this out to great effect. Stylized reality is much more appealing.

It is impressive in that they can do a reasonably close realtime approximation of Debevec's tech on their hardware. It may also become a reality in about, 5 to 8 years, when the next generation of consoles are released and their GPUs become the lowest common denominator for development.
I do agree that it isn't that convincing, but it's still quite good for a realtime demo.

As for the usability of this tech, I have some doubts - some games could certainly benefit from utilizing the voice and performance capture talent's appearance as well, but they aren't as many. LA Noire was a nice example where the likeness was put to good use, and now Beyond seems to be another.

But many other games would probably prefer to rely on a lot more artistic freedom and develop the faces of their lead characters on their own, without such restrictions. And we will still need games that aren't completely realistic, or feature aliens and monsters that can't be captured, from Blizzard's stuff through Mass Effect and Darksiders and so on, just to name a few. For those art styles and universes, this tech can't really be used; although elements of it like the skin shading are probably going to be utilized quite often.

Originally Posted by Laa-Yosh:It is impressive in that they can do a reasonably close realtime approximation of Debevec's tech on their hardware. It may also become a reality in about, 5 to 8 years, when the next generation of consoles are released and their GPUs become the lowest common denominator for development.
I do agree that it isn't that convincing, but it's still quite good for a realtime demo.

As for the usability of this tech, I have some doubts - some games could certainly benefit from utilizing the voice and performance capture talent's appearance as well, but they aren't as many. LA Noire was a nice example where the likeness was put to good use, and now Beyond seems to be another.

But many other games would probably prefer to rely on a lot more artistic freedom and develop the faces of their lead characters on their own, without such restrictions. And we will still need games that aren't completely realistic, or feature aliens and monsters that can't be captured, from Blizzard's stuff through Mass Effect and Darksiders and so on, just to name a few. For those art styles and universes, this tech can't really be used; although elements of it like the skin shading are probably going to be utilized quite often.

I would love to have this integrated into Maya (maybe it will be) and just render the eyes in software. The eyes here are the most distracting part and it's not a tech thing it's more about technique because the shader they used for the sclera was so shiny it looks like a glass eye. I don't know that you can totally get out of the "Uncanny Valley" all the time for every character with a magical push button hardware solution, but this (the real-time demo) is nice to see.

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